The present invention relates generally to the field of network nodes, and more particularly to client hops in a network.
Network nodes in a distributed computing environment, e.g., a network with a client/server architecture, are hardware devices acting as connection points for receiving and transmitting data. Network nodes can be any of the following, but are not limited to, gateways, routers, modems and switches. A gateway can provide client management functionality by appropriately routing data between clients and servers in the network. A gateway can further act as protocol converter for interoperability amongst devices connected to the gateway. A gateway can be configured to have certain operational constraints, such as a maximum number of connected clients and/or a maximum workload that can be supported in terms of computing resources associated with the gateway.
A network hop refers to one segment of a path in the network between two connection points, e.g., a client and a network node or a client and a server. A network hop may be an intermediate hardware device on the path which receives and transmits data. An intermediate hardware device can be, for example, but is not limited to, a router. Sent data can incur latencies associated with each network hop and therefore, a greater number of network hops typically results in proportionally diminished real-time performance associated with data transmission across the network.